War on Women update: AFL-CIO president clubs Nikki Haley piÃ±ata

There’s nothing quite like the pure, unbridled joy of a union operative expressing hatred for a sworn enemy. All the usual niceties of politics go right out the window. No one really expects a union boss to be civil or tolerant.

Just minutes before sharing a stage with Barack Obama in September 2011, Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa declared, “President Obama, this is your army! We are ready to march. Let’s take these sons of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong!” No one in the mainstream press asked Obama to denounce that, or worried about a “climate of hate” taking shape.

In that spirit, here’s the president of South Carolina’s AFL-CIO, Donna DeWitt, going berserk with a baseball bat and smashing a piñata printed with the face of South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, while the rest of the assembled union members shriek and howl with delight:

The text accompanying the video on YouTube is a scream: “Gov. Nikki Haley has been vicious to organized labor, saying in her State of the State address that ‘unions are not needed, wanted or welcome in South Carolina.’ After years of being treated like a union thug, Donna Dewitt gets sweet revenge at a retirement reception in her honor.” She got her revenge for being called a “union thug” by grabbing a club and acting like a thug? Touche!

If you’re interested, here’s the full passage from Governor Haley’s second State of South Carolina address, in which she told the unions they’re not “needed, wanted, or welcome in South Carolina.” Our friends at the AFL-CIO didn’t trouble themselves to include her explanation for why:

Finally, I love that we are one of the least unionized states in the country. It is an economic development tool unlike any other. Our companies in South Carolina understand that they are only as good as those who work for them, and they take care of their employees. The people of South Carolina have a strong work ethic, they value loyalty, and they take tremendous pride in the quality of their work. We don’t have unions in South Carolina because we don’t need unions in South Carolina.

However, as we saw with the assault from the NLRB, the unions don’t understand that. They will do everything they can to invade our state and drive a wedge between our workers and our employers. We can’t have that. Unions thrive in the dark. Secrecy is their greatest ally, sunlight their most potent adversary. We can and we will do more to protect South Carolina businesses by shining that light on every action the unions take. With the help and support of Chairman Bill Sandifer and Director Catherine Templeton we will create a competitive playing field for the companies that choose to call our state home.

We will require unions to tell the people of South Carolina how much money they are making on our backs, which politicians they are funding, and how much they are paying themselves. We will protect the right of every private and public citizen to refuse to join a union, and, by Executive Order, I will make it clear that our state will not subsidize striking workers by paying them unemployment benefits. And we’ll make the unions understand full well that they are not needed, not wanted, and not welcome in the State of South Carolina.

I think we just might have a “War on Women” incident here! What would the constipated liberal guardians of “civility” say about video of a Tea Party event where Sandra Fluke was clubbed in effigy? Or Michelle Obama? Or how about a female Democrat governor, like Christine Gregoire of Washington State, or Beverly Perdue of North Carolina? (Okay, they might let a Bev Perdue piñata slide.)

Remember when President Obama was furiously milking the Sandra Fluke affair for all it was worth, and said that he wouldn’t want his daughters to be treated like Fluke if they decided to go into politics someday? Would he want their faces printed on piñatas and pounded with clubs by their political opponents, while a crowd screamed “Whack her again!”

Do we want to know what came out of the AFL-CIO’s Nikki Haley piñata?

Naturally, the AFL-CIO is trying to suppress the video, as reported by the Columbia Free Times:

“Do you think we can get this video pulled,” asked a national AFL-CIO official in an email to Palmetto State union sources.

The author of the email also worried the video might get “picked up by tea partiers, maybe even Haley herself, to attack labor again.”

Gosh, we wouldn’t want that! Who knows what those crazy Tea Party types might do? It probably wouldn’t involve a screaming lunatic, a baseball bat, and a piñata, though.

Katarina Trinko of National Reviewhad a phone conversation with DeWitt, who says she doesn’t regret the video: “As you can see, I’m not vicious, I’m not hateful. I think if we’d had a donkey and played pin the tail on the donkey with her face on it, I guess, it’s a children’s game and I guess people would have gotten upset about that. There was certainly no viciousness. It was all in fun. Although she has bashed unions for quite some time.”